DRUG REGULATION IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE TO HELL

THE DISGRACE of unrestrained addiction and squalor in Skid Road
Vancouver is a threat to the health and peace of North and West
Vancouver; whatever it takes, whatever it costs, we owe it to our
children and elders to keep it out of our community.

To begin: a variation on Byron.

Through life's skid road, so dim and dirty, I have drugged myself to
three-and-thirty, What have these years left to me? Nothing! Except
thirty-three!

I was a studio-guest on the Bill Good Show of Nov. 30, along with Ann
Livingston, a spokeswoman for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug
Users, and, by telephone, Professor Bernard Harcourt, a law professor
at the University of Chicago. We discussed a recent police crackdown
on tawdry public disorder in Skid Road by injection drug addicts.

In a public statement announcing the crackdown, Vancouver police Insp.
Bob Rolls stated that it was "to target the users who are creating
street disorder, who are in close distance to the supervised injection
site and who are refusing to use that facility."

On behalf of the network, Livingston expressed outrage at the police
action and, in her closing comment, said, "We need to boldly implement
programs and see if it (the safe infection site) works. . . there
aren't enough safe injection sites - we need four or five more sites -
four or five blocks apart. . . ."

My angry response: "Well, if we have four or five more you can write
off Skid Road - it will become, in truth, . . . a road to hell. And
the notion that there are people down there who don't deserve the
police being around them - that's false. The Downtown Eastside is the
last resort of people who need low-cost housing. There are probably
16,000 decent people down there. They can't go anywhere else and they
need the protection of the police."

And last to speak, an outraged caller identified only as Ray.

"I get tired of listening to these bleeding hearts get on and do all
their yattering about what drug addicts need and don't need. Most of
these people . . . really don't want help anyway. . . . And when they
do have the opportunity they won't take advantage of it.

"I've got family members who've been involved in drugs for 20 years.
I've talked to them endlessly because I've been involved in these drug
programs myself over the years and I've found that they really don't
want help; all they want is drugs and whatever else is free that's
going with it.

"And people like myself that are diabetic and need drugs that will
help diabetes - you can't get it free because the government won't pay
for it. But they are ready, willing and able to lump just about
anything they need down there on the Eastside for all these drug
addicts that are running around the streets making Vancouver look like
the lowlife capital of the world."

Let me take you from Ray's common sense to a futuristic "public health
approach" - an addict's utopia that excludes moral and ethical
standards, and avoids vigorous intervention by detoxification,
counselling and abstinence.

On Oct. 19, I spent the day paying rapt attention to a group of
proselytizers from around the world, figuratively beating drums and
shaking tambourines to a refrain called a "shared vision of the
future." They came to a symposium at Vancouver's Wosk Centre for
Dialogue to praise Beyond Drug Prohibition - A Public Health Approach,
a discussion paper produced by the Health Officers Council of British
Columbia.

The council is a registered society of "public health" physicians who
want to tell us how to improve our health - in this instance
Vancouver's chronic, confirmed and hardened drug addicts; and, of
course, all dedicated recreational druggies.

My fellow columnist, Jerry Paradis, a speaker at the symposium, gave
high praise to the council paper in his commentary, A Global
Perspective On Drugs, published by the North Shore News on Nov. 16.
"At the core of the conference was a report by the Health Officers
Council. Theirs was a succinct, well-written argument, supported by
extensive research that sets out all of the grounds for the
establishment of a system of legalization and regulation of
psychoactive drugs."

I recoil from his assessment and, to the contrary, find the health
officers' document to be unsound, implausible and characterized by
misleading and specious reasoning.

In a nutshell the council is saying: Don't worry folks, we'll do your
thinking for you. Just decriminalize illicit drugs and let Big Brother
control drug addicts through regulation.

Chafing at the hindrance of the criminal status of illicit drugs, the
authors of the discussion paper advocate production and availability
of drugs in a "tightly" controlled system in a "tight" regulatory
framework. "This would move individual harmful illegal drug use from
being primarily a criminal issue (the council calls it a failed
criminal prohibition approach) to being primarily a health issue."

To give credence to a move to regulation of drugs, the council insists
upon the use of "illegal" rather than the broader term "illicit."

"Illicit" was anathema to the council's purpose for the reason that
"it can be used to describe prohibition based on cultural norms and
values other than law, and suggests a moral or social as opposed to
legal rationale for prohibition."

The discussion paper pointedly avoids the greater harm that regulation
will create for juveniles. Yet these doctors must know that there will
be a significant number of kids who will venture into the adult drug
subculture of stupefaction or hyperactive behaviour; a sinister and
potentially lethal world where they will end up in the sleazy grip of
lowlife black marketeers.

When you prick the conscience of an advocate of regulation he/she will
admit that a black market and organized crime will not be eradicated
by decriminalization.

This certainly is the case in a parallel paper, Preventing Harm from
Psychoactive Substance Use, published by the City of Vancouver in
June. The city's bureaucrats recommend a cautious approach to
regulation, one drug at a time, accepting that "the black market could
be significantly reduced but realistically will not be curtailed and
will continue to be a source of harm to individuals and communities,"
and that "concern will arise that removing prohibition will 'send the
wrong message, particularly to youth.'"

The health officers would have you believe that every addict has an
absolute right to use psychoactive substances. Autonomy,
self-determination as the council puts it, would prevail subject only
to regulation.

Addiction, a criminal malady of depravity, would be destigmatized and
regarded as a benign illness, resolved, when use becomes abuse, by a
Big Brother health authority.

Addicts become clients - not patients and certainly not criminals - to
be guided along a path of continuing dependence on drugs through
injection sites, opiate prescription and methadone treatment. As in an
Orwellian laboratory they will become grist for epidemiological
cohorts, be made the subject of theories, techniques and methods, and
they will be memorialized in pseudo-academic reports and requests for
continuing and increasing government funding of a regulatory albatross
- - inimical to and the antithesis of a decent society.

A druggie's narcissistic right - to be and continue to be an addict -
will be enshrined in his/her autonomy (self determination) under
Principles of a Public Health Approach.

Direct action through detoxification and abstinence - unreliable as
too primitive and unscientific - will be a mere sidebar in this
visionary scheme for a greater "just society."

I hope that North and West Vancouverites will take a moral and ethical
approach to the epidemic of addiction and reject the amoralist and
rancid creed of absolutist regulation with its maze of bewildering
pathways and blind alleys designed and operated by an all-knowing
bureaucracy.